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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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And then the fact that large-animal vets end up both being disproportionately male (relative to the field as a whole) and getting paid more gets blamed on male privilege so women can be "oppressed" even in a field where they are the overwhelming majority...

Surprised there isn't sufficient horse girls population to produce large animal female Veterinarians. I had a graduate who was a Dressage rider and some of the things she'd casually tell me about horse maintenance/ownership were 'oh god ew' to me and she seemed to have a lot of other intelligent girls in her social network who were hands on with it all.

Even if you manage to cultivate a horse-focussed large animal practice, brute strength is often a limiting factor -- we actually had a husband-wife team (mixed practice, both vets) for a while, and even though she was probably more knowledgeable about horses than he was, there were a lot of of calls that she simply was not physically effective at dealing with. One time he and I skidded a cast horse around to get his legs pointing downhill in -10 and blowing snow -- then lifted him to his feet (the horse, not the vet) with straps around his belly. If the wife had been on that call, the horse would have died.

Large animal veterinary medicine can be a little too grim for horse lovers.

The Stereotypical Horse Girl is also rich as flip, and as such, doesn't need the money.

I still remember when my mother took horse riding lessons and made noises about buying the horse she really liked, with a price-tag of around 40K.

For a horse.

That will die in a decade or so.

My response to this was along the lines of 'Are you absolutely insane?', especially as she was expecting me to help take care of the damn thing. That would not have ended well.

That will die in a decade or so.

Horses are capable of reproducing though, unlike cars.

Or as Heinlein phrased it, "A horse can make another horse, but that's a trick a tractor never learned."

Large animal veterinary care is not only gross, it is dangerous, and most of it is not pets, it is livestock.

Don't horses fit better into the 'livestock' category than the 'pet' category to begin with? They can be pretty dangerous as well.

I don't think most of the horses that are still kept in any Western country are kept to serve as lifestock.

Yeah, but I understood to argument to be "being a vet is not about cute little animals, but big bulky ones", horses, whether or not you officially classify them as livestock, are more similar to cows when it comes to maintenance than they are to cats or dogs, and girls who are into horseback riding will already be familiar with that type of animal.

I know but a lot of horse girls are very comfortable with gross/dangerous stuff in my experience. Maybe I'm over-estimating the population but my ex-graduate came from an agricultural family and had all sorts of fucked up stories

My assumption is that cattle are what pay the bills, and mostly-horse practice is relatively rare.

Most horse lovers are women, but most female animal lovers are not horse lovers.

Unless vet schools are filtering by interests, puppy lovers will still far outnumber horse lovers.

I'm guessing most male large animal vets come from an agricultural background involving large herds, rather than equestrian

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